Some families do a better job of thriving in difficult circumstances and I’ve wanted to imagine through stories how they do it. I’ve selected my parents’ generation as a “lab” to consider surviving tough times. I hope I can discover coping mechanisms that transcend time.
Starving and sick, the enemy shivered. Connor sat and pulled the dying man’s head into his lap. “Remember, the man who’s trying to kill you is a human being too,” his mom had said. There in the jungle dusk, he held the soldier until his breathing stopped. He walked on, leaving the jungle to consume the remains. He heard his rifle clips clattering. Gotta stop that noise. That was his last thought before he collapsed, curling up and shivering. Must be losing my mind.Is this what it feels like to die? He closed his eyes and drifted off.
This is my contribution—late—to the Carrot Ranch Literary Communityblog challenge. As always, it’s 99 words, no more no less. The challenge is to write an escape. I’m trying to condense my novel-in-progress into 99 words. Let’s see how it goes.
Analog Recording System Broke Down. Now All Digital
She sat, shredding tissue in her lap, waiting for a counselor. Once he’d passed out, she’d tied her husband, spread-eagled, to their four-poster bed using two pairs of thigh-hi nylons. Then she beat him with his own belt—the buckle end. Bruises and abrasions on her own body still throbbed. The old ones made her skin a rainbow. He was a lawyer. Every time she’d tried to leave, he’d found a way to block her. If she could make them believe she was a danger to him, maybe they would check her in and save her life—and his.
During the War that broke apart Yugoslavia, I saw on TV a boy, twelve-years-old I think, carrying a Kalashnikov and vowing revenge for the murder of his brother. I don’t remember which combatant group he claimed. It didn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. What matters is the endless cycle of revenge that began with that war.
It tell this story, because Branislav Bojcic’s book, I hate my brother: the story about love and hate, reveals the traumas that can cause that thirst for revenge and the devastation that follows. In this individual story about one man, his family, and his friend, he has encapsulated a cycle of love and hatred that plays itself out all over the world every day. He says he had to leave his country because of the book, and I believe him. The people of the resulting divided countries, especially the leadership that precipitated the savagery, don’t want the details broadcast.
I draw readers’ attention, however, to the book’s subtitle: “The Story About Love and Hate.” It brings up yet again the vital connection between love and hate and the possibility of redemption.
I know, I know, it’s been a while. Good to see you again. It’s been a depressing year, but I’m back maybe not regularly. I’m working on it. What follows is another of those Girlie On the Edge six-sentence blog challenge posts. The challenge word is Rodeo.
My youngest son and I took Grandma to her last rodeo; she must have been 97 or 98.
Life had been tough, one baby had died at two weeks, her son had died young and her daughter was dying an inch at a time—so she didn’t laugh much; didn’t cry either.
You know, a rodeo’s a rodeo and she’d seen many, but then they trotted out the wild cow race.
For those of you who don’t know, a wild cow race involves organizing a few teams of racers, letting a bunch of cows loose, and then chasing them down with saddles and bridles, saddling them, bridling them, and riding them (one team member) back to the starting point.
You can imagine the potential for mayhem with a bunch of old range cows—the stubborn refusal to be caught, the foot-setting refusal to lead, the running up and down the arena, the bucking, the spills, and so on.
Half-way through the race, I looked over at Grandma, a woman I hadn’t seen laugh in years, and tears were running down her cheeks, she was holding her sides, laughing like it was the last day of her life and she was going to get the most out of it.
I haven’t worked for a while. A little depressed maybe; bored with my own company due to self isolation. Writing time, you know. I hope I’m back with new energy. time will tell. Anyway, here’s my contribution to this week’s Carrot Ranch 99-word challenge.
Sod house roofs were just more prairie
When my grandparents put in the septic tank back in 1951 when we got REA, they found the hewed rafters of Billy Arnold’s original soddy, wood that lay rotting in a jumble beneath generations of dirt and prairie on the level north of the house. When Grandma told me, I closed my eyes and pictured the blocks of root-frozen dirt and the roof, a growing prairie of grass and wildflowers. If I were the rabbit on the roof, would I vary my diet with some tough purple coneflower, or daisy fleabane? Perhaps I’d just stick to the succulent grasses.
“In the real world,
villains too often succeed and heroes, too often die,” says writer James
McBride — and that’s one of the great things about being novelist. “In
novels you can move matters around … you get to show the best side of people.
You get to show redemption, and forgiveness, and you get to show the parts of
people that most of us never get to see.” I loved this quote from Scott
Simon’s interview this morning on NPR. It articulates so well what I’m trying
to do.
This book has blown my mind and I’m not quite finished reading.
I’m revising a novel set in the first years following World
War II. One of my main characters is in Paris. Her lover was a member of the
French Resistance. So . . .
I’ve been reading a lot about the war and the post war
period and I recently stumbled on a book entitled Eleos by D. R. Bell.
That novel encompasses not just the consequences of the Holocaust, but also of
the Armenian genocide that preceded.
“In the Bible,” Bell writer, “God was willing to spare Sodom
if ten righteous people could be found.” Ten people in a whole city seems easy.
Bell seems to concur. “How low are our expectations of righteousness,” he
writes.
The crux of the book follows immediately, at least in my
thinking. Though there is much more to reveal about the survivors of both
horrors, one of the main characters continues with his attempt to understand
how either or both could have happened. “Like guilt,” he says, “the
righteousness is individual, not collective.” He argues that a righteous person
can’t absolve the murderer or murderers of their guilt. “the only redemption
there is must be our own.”
Individual responsibility. I’ve written several times about
our responsibility as writers to write actively, not because it’s more
exciting, but because active writing assigns responsibility. The sentence,
“Abel was murdered,” means something entirely different from, “Cain killed
Abel.” It has to do with telling the whole truth as much as we are able. Even
in fiction, our characters do stuff, some of it pretty nasty. We can provide
backstory to explain how that character did that bad thing, but if you believe in
free agency, the bad actor needs to be assigned responsibility.
Throughout the novel, Bell sets his characters, all victims
of the two genocides, in a world that has moved on. These characters argue,
over and over, that letting the perpetrators go free or suffer minor penalties
assure that there will be another genocide, and another, and another.
In addition to that thought, I’m still processing Bell’s grey
zone, “the moral compromise that prisoners make in order to survive another
day.” How do we assign responsibility to those prisoners? I don’t have an
answer to that.
I found the book unsettling in an important way. I’m still
processing and struggling to imagine how we stop the next genocide when
genocidal wars rage all around us.
I am isolated by design. I wanted to write my own stories. I’d
been wanting to write them for years. So seven years ago, I earned my MA in
creative writing and I published my first book—a family memoir I researched in
collaboration with Grandma Hazel.
I closed myself in my house with a computer and printer. I
wrote and revised, worked with beta readers, and edited. I marketed, too, until
my grandson was born. I became his primary caregiver and an infant became nearly
my only companion.
A few weeks ago, I realized I’d overdone the solitude.
This bit of flash fiction, or more like essay, is a result of this week’s Carrot Ranch Literary Community blog prompt: key lime pie. It’s funny the kinds of associations one makes, isn’t it?
Key lime pie tastes of freedom in tropical paradise.
The lime, a citrus hybrid, grows in places like the Florid Keys and the islands of the Caribbean, reminding me of Ernest Hemingway, tucked away in the Keys, writing of the Spanish Civil War, Fidel and Raul Castro, and Che Guevara overthrowing the Batista regime in Cuba. Farther back in time—probably before agronomists developed key limes—the blacks in Haiti rose up in a slave rebellion that freed Haiti from French colonial rule and abolished slavery there.
Do you suppose any of those revolutionaries celebrated with key lime pie?
Can’t you see Hemingway lounging on beach with a mojito?
The gist of this story appears in my novel, See Willy See, to be released tomorrow, November 8, 2019.It will take a while to get to the bookstores and libraries, but it’s available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Smashwords.
Stationed in Panama, training for combat, Connor dreaded his sister’s letters from Paris where she served in the U.S. Consulate and where they Nazis were poised to take over the city.
“I was just telling Daniel about the time Freckles got to snooping under the woodpile and found that nest of baby rabbits,” she wrote, “remember how we took them out of the dog’s very mouth?”
“I look in the woods here and imagine all the baby
rabbits hidden in them.”
Connor smiled, remembering all their rescue missions—until
he realized she was writing in code.
“Jesus!” he exploded, scrubbing his hands through
already rumpled hair, glancing around at his tent mates, watching him.
“My sister’s French Resistance boyfriend is going to
get her killed rescuing little Jewish bunny rabbits.”
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